MI6 Spies Wallowed in Edwardian Nudes, Gaffes, Champagne: Books

Keith Jeffery, author of "The Secret History of MI-6." Source: Penguin via Bloomberg

Sept. 21 (Bloomberg) -- It has taken a century, but
Britain’s MI6 intelligence service is finally emerging,
blinking, into the light of day.

Until the 1980s, MI6 didn’t officially exist. In the 1990s,
it got a flashy new headquarters fronting the River Thames. And
today its early history has been revealed in “The Secret
History of MI6, 1909-1949” by Keith Jeffery, a professor of
British history at Queen’s University Belfast.

The Secret Intelligence Service, as it’s formally known,
was set up in 1909 to monitor Germany’s arms buildup before
World War I. It started out as a one-man band.

Its first director, Mansfield Cumming, was a gifted and
vigorous naval officer who donned a toupee and false moustache
for clandestine meetings and signed his memos “C,” a name his
successors adopted. He was also a fan of Edwardian pornography,
or, as he put it, a student of “the female form divine.”

Everything you have ever heard about the perils and
pleasures of spying was there from the beginning. Turf wars with
diplomats were legion, prompting the British ambassador to
Paris, Sir Duff Cooper, to write that “a diplomatist has as
much right to consider himself insulted if he is called a spy as
a soldier has if he is called a murderer.”

The reputation of intelligence men for high living,
burnished by Ian Fleming’s James Bond, was often deserved. One
of Cumming’s earliest agents demanded a champagne allowance.
Beautiful female spies were deployed from the start to lure
enemies into spilling their secrets. And, yes, agents really did
conceal messages, jewels or suicide tablets in signet rings and
the like.

‘Capital Sport’

“Capital sport,” was how Cumming once described his
profession. That was before two world wars and the Soviet threat
helped MI6 expand into a powerful instrument in the struggle
against Fascism and Bolshevism. The British Empire made the
agency active across the globe, and the “Ultra” intelligence
gathered by British code breakers enhanced its reputation.

What grabs our attention, though, is the less familiar
story of the Anglo-American intelligence relationship.
Cooperation began early, against Moscow’s Comintern and all
manner of subversives. Yet in the 1930s MI6 was still gathering
intelligence on U.S. soil about aircraft development, chemical
warfare and Irish nationalists, among other things. Only in 1938
did it stop, on the grounds that it was quicker to ask the FBI
or the U.S. military attaché in London.

‘Wild Bill’ Donovan

Then came the golden era of William “Wild Bill” Donovan,
the American military man who headed what became the wartime
Office of Strategic Services. In 1940, the U.S. ambassador to
London, Joseph P. Kennedy, was telling American industrialists
that they should look to Adolf Hitler for their markets because
Britain could never hold out. Donovan, an Anglophile, was
convinced it would.

Donovan had the ear of both President Franklin Delano
Roosevelt and FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover. His championing of
close ties with MI6 was at the root of the Anglo-American
special relationship in the intelligence field.

This is an official history, though not so official that
Jeffery disguises the failures, defections and defeats. One was
MI6’s clumsy handling of the notorious Zinoviev letter, a forged
instruction from Moscow to the British Communist Party that
helped topple Ramsay MacDonald’s Labour government in 1924.

Then came the Venlo Incident of 1939, when senior British
agents were seized in a Nazi trap in the Netherlands. We read,
too, of the junior MI6 man who failed to hand the Foreign Office
information about the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, under which
Germany and the Soviet Union carved up Poland. And the
shortsighted ban on MI6 operations in Russia that lasted till
1949, a hangover from the wartime alliance with Moscow.

Kim Philby

Another major shortcoming was the tight social circle that
enabled senior MI6 man and Soviet spy Kim Philby to betray his
country for so long. Moscow recruited one British operative,
George Blake, after he was captured in the Korean War.

MI6 successes were nonetheless impressive -- the work with
the French Resistance, the warning about Germany’s development
of V-2 rockets, and the exploits of the MI6 head of station in
Berlin, Frank Foley, who used his cover as a passport control
officer to rescue Jews.

Jeffery’s book is presented without sensationalism, and
it’s all the more imposing for that. Espionage buffs will
eagerly await the next volume, though we shouldn’t hold our
breath. As the material becomes more sensitive, who knows how
long the security clearance will take?

“The Secret History of MI6” is published by Penguin Press
in the U.S. and by Bloomsbury in the U.K. under the title “MI6:
The History of the Secret Intelligence Service 1909-1949” (810
pages, $39.95, 30 pounds). To buy this book in North America,
click here.

(George Walden, a former U.K. diplomat and member of
Parliament, is a critic for Muse, the arts and leisure section
of Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are his own.)

To contact the writer on the story:
George Walden in London at gwashch@aol.com.